Dodgy Duplication

4 replies [Last post]
Stephen Carter
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Joined: Nov 18 1999

I recently had a number of DVDs returned because of skipping etc.

The discs did in fact skip.

The master DVDs were fine and subsequent copies were OK.

They were recorded in a Microboards based tower with no hard drive.

I have two theories: The Verbatim DVD-R were purchased from a Pound shop and were about half the PC World price. Were the blank discs pirate clones?

Somebody suggested that using a DVD duplicator tower with a hard drive is more reliable than using a DVD as the source drive direct.

Any thoughts?

Stephen Carter
www.seraphmedia.org.uk

Gavin Gration
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Joined: Jul 29 1999

Cheap discs test: Put them in a computer use Nero disc info to show the makers ID. There are probably other apps to do this.

We have towers with HDD and towers without. In our experience the HDD towers are no more or less reliable but are very handy for repeat jobs.

The towers without hard drives have been fitted with writers as the source instead of a ROM drive. We found that ROM drives produced strange but repeatable read errors - once replaced with Writers the error messages dissapeared.

In general when you have a "bad-burn" the tray will not eject. You will see an error message and have to cancel it on the duplicator.

I have seen discs fail at the burn stage - usually caused by finger prints or other debris on the disc surface. I have never seen a disc fail at the verify stage in a duplicator.

Discs that skip can be caused by many things. The usual things like data rate set too high etc. However, a faulty writer can also cause a bad burn. I haven't had a writer fail like that in a tower but I have had one fail in a computer. There was no indication of a fault during the writing but they would not verify.

Is it possible that one of the writers in your tower is failing?

I don't know how many writers/tower you have but assuming you have one 7 way tower and made 50 copies (7 x 7 runs plus 1). If 7 or 8 of those discs come back then it's likely that one of the writers in the tower is on the blink.

Stephen Carter
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Joined: Nov 18 1999

Thankyou for your extremely helpful posting.
I do have a faulty drive in the tower which now won't read discs at all but looking at the statistics it seems unlikely to be the cause as those who have had problems have had several faulty discs. (These are conference recordings with 14 different titles). Do you force the copying speed to a low value?

Stephen Carter
www.seraphmedia.org.uk

Gavin Gration
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Joined: Jul 29 1999
Stephen Carter wrote:
Thankyou for your extremely helpful posting.
I do have a faulty drive in the tower which now won't read discs at all but looking at the statistics it seems unlikely to be the cause as those who have had problems have had several faulty discs. (These are conference recordings with 14 different titles). Do you force the copying speed to a low value?

I have recently been advised that burning at a low speed risks over-exposing the dye.

All I can say is that we've been duplicating several thousdand dics per month at 4x for a good few years and can count the number of complaints on one hand. YMMV. ;)

Rob James
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Joined: Jun 26 2001

I use 16X DVD-R Rytek blanks and copy at 6X no problems over the past few hundred.

Rob The picture is only there to keep the sound in sync